Pages

Sunday, February 19, 2012

The One With The Strangers

To make a friend be a friend they say. I won't go into the "Who are they" thing, simply because there is no definitive answer. Sometimes they are everyone else, and other times they are one person editing a Wikipedia article.

Anyway, this adage appears to be mostly true regarding the internet. Certainly the more comments I leave and more sites I join, the more comments and followers I get. But let me tell you something: I have learned that many of my long-term followers are nowhere to be found. They have vanished from the net like last night's date after she found out I live with my cat and don't have a car.

Shouldn't friends tell us when they're going away? Did these folks die and no one informed me? Surely death notices are a prerequisite of friendship. I feel so abandoned. It's like the time when I was in 3rd grade and my parents moved and forgot to tell me and when I walked into the house after school one evening there was a group of strangers at the dinner table. Worse, it was "they". "They" said, "Who are you?" , and when I asked what happened to my folks, they acted like I was crazy. I then asked what happened to my friends, because I suddenly realized I'd invited them to eat with us that night and they weren't there either. It was like that Twilight Zone episode where the old lady is awakened every night by mysterious phone calls and it turns out they're coming from her long-dead boyfriend, making calls from the grave via a downed telephone line.

Then they said it. "To make friends you have to be a friend." I did what any rational person would do. I fled.

And I still don't know what happened to those departed followers whose avatars still haunt my followers list.

I'm new to the blogging world, only at it for seven months, but as my blog list grows I notice that I tend to give the most comments to those bloggers who leave them for my posts. These are the people I know are out there, reading and participating. They deserve my attention most, I think. Interestingly enough, none of my real-life friends care to read my posts or follow my blog; I had to seek out strangers on the web to find anyone willing to read my work. (Mrs. C. excluded, of course.) Have a great Sunday

I've ducked out on bloggers, usually those who dump me first. Petty, aren't I? About once a year I try to purge my too-long reading list of the blogs that are no longer active, or who don't follow me anymore; and I clean up my blog list in largely the same manner. There are some to whom I remain loyal regardless - blogs that I cannot resist for one reason or another.But I reserve the right to leave them too, should they no longer please me.

It's simple attrition. People burn out and vanish. I took a break last summer, but I let people know I was doing it. My blog says I have over 300 followers, but only 20 or show up on any kind of regular basis.

Yup, good points. I think somehow I may have slipped off the tracks with this post. I was trying to be funny. I thought everyone would be looking at the bit about my parents moving and not telling me and the TZ episode referenced which had nothing to do with the abandonment story and the title of the post which is a steal from the series "Friends", because believe it or don't, the subject of this post was supposed to be about making friends. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. *sigh*